How Do I Get More Reviews Online?

An overwhelming majority of patrons make decisions on where they will eat, stay and spend their money based on ratings on various websites. Your star rating on a site like Google, TripAdvisor, or Yelp is the number one factor that drives customer behavior. Thankfully because of this websites like this have leveled the playing field between smaller restaurants and hotels and larger national chains.

These tools make it easy to build a great reputation online from real customers who have spent money at your establishment. At the same time, a few bad reviews can hurt your business traffic by deterring customers from coming to your business. For some businesses it’s hard to recover from three or four 1 Star reviews dragging your average down. A 2016 study said that every decrease in star rating on review sites lead to 10% of lost revenue. Luckily there’s an easy way you can get more positive reviews.

Based on a 2017 study, almost 90% of customers are willing to share a positive experience with their friends or family. That same study found that 30% of people on their own typically share good experiences on their social media channels. What if you could get that more of your customers who had a great experience to rate their service or share about it? You can it’s as easy as asking them to.

An Email Is Worth 100 Reviews.

Email Marketing has been put on the back burner for most businesses since the rise of social media. But, it’s still on of the most effective ways to drive action. A simple email to customers asking customers to review their experience can lead to the desired outcome of more positive reviews. Ecommerce stores have been doing this for years by incentivising their customers with discounts for reviews (both good and bad) and there is no reason why this strategy couldn’t work for the hospitality industry. Look at the example below from a coffee shop I recently visited. It’s incredibly simple, no frills, just a prompt and image below with a link to their Yelp page. While I love this coffee shop and go there regularly I would have never thought to give them a review on Yelp without being prompted.

Email Marketing isn’t the only way to achieve the desired results of more online reviews. This same tactic of asking for reviews can be used via Instagram Stories or a Facebook post. The main takeaway from this post is to start asking for reviews. The more you ask, the more likely you are to receive more reviews.